How to write a call brief your AI can actually use

"Call the restaurant and book a table"

That's a brief. It's also how you end up with no table.

The host picks up and asks how many. For what day? What time? The assistant doesn't know, because you didn't say. Or you did say 7:30, and 7:30 is gone, and the host offers 8:15. Is 8:15 all right? Nobody told it. So the call ends politely and you get a summary that finishes with a question, by which time the 8:15 has gone to someone else.

None of that is the AI being slow. Hand the same sentence to a new assistant on their first morning and you'd get the same result. A call brief is what you'd tell a capable person who doesn't live inside your head.

The five lines

Every brief that works has these, in roughly this order. Some take four words. Write them the way you'd say them.

• The purpose, in one sentence. Why is this call happening? If you can't get it into a sentence, you're describing two calls.
• Who to ask for. The host stand, the service desk, the owner by name. The front line of a business is often not who decides.
• What you want. With the numbers: the day, the time, how many, which car, what size.
• What you'll accept instead. A range of times. The second-choice day. This line finishes more calls than the other four put together.
• What to never agree to. A fee, a longer contract, a day you can't do. Say it and the line holds to it, then tells you what was offered instead.

A worked brief for a table on Friday

A booking is the easiest place to practice, because every detail is a number. Graham wants dinner for two.

• Purpose: Book a table for two this Friday, under Graham.
• Ask for: The host stand.
• Want: 7:30pm.
• Will accept: Anything between 7:00 and 8:30. If Friday is full, ask about the waitlist.
• Never: Don't agree to a deposit. If they need one, tell me and I'll sort it out.

A worked brief for a plumber's quote

Quotes go wrong in a different way. The call goes fine and the answer is useless, because "about eighteen hundred" means nothing until you know what's in it. So the brief says which details to bring home.

• Purpose: Get a price for replacing a water heater with a tankless one, at a house in Costa Mesa.
• Ask for: Whoever does the quoting.
• Want: A price, what it includes (the unit, labor, permit, hauling the old one away), how long the price holds, and the earliest start date.
• Will accept: A price range, if they won't give a figure without a visit. In that case ask when they could come and look.
• Never: Don't book the job. Don't agree to a call-out fee for the visit without checking with me.

A worked brief for the car that makes a noise

Here you're handing over a small decision, with a ceiling on it. That's fine. People are often nervous of doing this and then pleased when it works.

• Purpose: Get the car looked at. There's a grinding noise from the front left when braking.
• Ask for: The service desk.
• Want: Thursday morning, and a rough idea of what the noise is likely to be.
• Will accept: Friday before ten. If the inspection costs under two hundred, book it.
• Never: Don't approve any repair. Inspection only. The quote for the work comes back to me.

What you can leave out

Quite a lot, which is why a brief stays short. You don't need to write an opening line. The line says who it is and who it's calling for. You don't need to tell it to be honest about what it is, because it says it's an AI whenever anyone asks.

You don't need to give a callback number. It gives its own number and its own email address, not yours, unless you've said otherwise. And you don't need to forbid it from paying, because it never reads out a card number or agrees to a charge. (We put "never agree to a deposit" in the first brief anyway. It costs five words, and it tells the line what you want done next.)

Anything that's true on every call belongs in your standing instructions, not in the brief. Which restaurants you like, how to handle the school, what you never promise. Set those once in Settings and each brief gets shorter.

Voicemail and hold

Two situations deserve a line of their own, if they're likely. If the call might hit voicemail, say what to do there: leave a message with the line's number, or hang up and try again later. If you don't say, you've left it to chance.

And if the call means a long wait and you want to do the talking yourself, ask to be connected once a person answers. The line works the phone menu and sits through the hold music. When someone who can help picks up, it says "one moment" and rings your mobile. We wrote more on that in let an AI wait on hold for you.

The test before you send it

You can give a brief by calling the line, by texting it from your own mobile, from your dashboard, or through an assistant you've connected. The docs show the same brief in the form a developer would send. If the line answers calls for a business, the brief for that is a different animal, closer to a staff handbook, and how to brief an AI receptionist covers it.

Whichever way you send it, do one thing first. Read the brief out loud and imagine handing it to a temp. Would they have to come back and ask you anything? Then so will the line. Add the missing sentence.

Common questions

More on setup guides

• Conditional call forwarding, explained without the jargon
• Set up an AI phone agent in ten minutes
• Connect Claude to a phone line
• Get ChatGPT to make a phone call